A serial child sex offender is back behind bars after posing as a teenage lesbian to groom a vulnerable girl.

Charles Poyser convinced the 14-year-old victim she was in a relationship with a young woman in hundreds of online messages.

In reality the youngster was being duped into sending explicit images to a middle-aged paedophile with a 25-year history of sex crimes.

Now Poyser, 48, has been branded a dangerous offender and locked up for nine years at Manchester Crown Court. He will remain on licence until 2029.

Poyser’s sick ruse was discovered after police raided his home in July last year.

In 2012 Poyser was given an indefinite sexual offences prevention order which banned him from unsupervised contact with youngsters and allows police to call at his address and check on his internet use at any time.

Prosecutor Richard Orme told court that in May last year police went to Poyser’s address at Mayfield Road, Whalley Range and seized a mobile phone. Two hours later he got the bus into town and bought a new Huawei smartphone.

Two months later police raided the Mayfield Road address - where Poyser was living with another sex offender - and repeatedly asked him and the other man if there were any items capable of using the internet in the flat.

Both twice replied that there wasn’t, except for a laptop on the living room table. But during the search police found the box for the Huawei smartphone.

Asked where the device was, Poyser denied having it three times, before finally saying: “If you must know it’s hidden behind the toilet.”

A hole had been made in the floorboards and the smartphone was stashed in the void. Officers also seized memory sticks and memory cards, a laptop and a webcam.

When police searched the devices they learnt he had swapped 483 instant messages with a schoolgirl who was being bullied for being gay.

The girl had made it clear in the exchanges that she was 14, and Poyser had described himself as a ‘grown up’, but indicated he was close to the girl’s age by referring to his ‘dad’s Facebook account’.

He sent indecent images of a woman to her - claiming it was him - and encouraged her to give him intimate images and to perform sex act. The girl was so taken in by him that in one message to him she said: “When we don’t talk for hours upon end I feel so upset and alone it’s unbelievable.”

Officers also learnt he had hoarded nearly 2,500 indecent images of children aged as young as five, between May and June last year. He was also sharing images online with other perverts he was chatting to on Skype.

When interviewed, Poyser claimed that his online activity was better than finding a ‘physical victim’, and claimed he had been ‘shafted by the system’.

Poyser later pleaded guilty to offences of making indecent photos pf children, possessing a prohibited image of a child, distributing indecent photographs of children, inciting a child to engage in sexual activity and breaching a sexual offences prevention order.

His record includes three offences of indecent assault on underage girls, two offences of gross indecency with underage girls, an attempted rape of a girl under 16 and 67 child porn offences.

He has breached his SOPO twice before by attending events where he knew children would be present - including at Gay Pride in Blackpool - and by contacting a 12-year-old girl on Facebook.

Sending down Poyser, Judge Martin Rudland described him as a ‘devious and manipulative recidivist paedophile’.